Digital Photography by Adam Yasmin

There are always clues. Sometimes it’s as simple as a new sound. It’s the clicking fingernails of a small dog scurrying against hardwood floors, when you have neither. It’s the way the air tastes. It could be that the pillows are too thin, or the texture of unfamiliar sheets against your skin. But it’s always something, and you know immediately. Without realizing how you got there, or even opening your eyes, you know that you are in a strange bed, and it is unsettling.

He took my hand as we crossed the bridge that led to the beach, lacing our fingers and squeezing tight, once, before he let go. I shook my wrist out and didn’t look at him. Across from us, the sand was white, shining ghostly in the light, and the cars passing along the highway below were hazy and distant as coins tossed to the bottom of a fountain. Chill air lashed at my cheekbones as our bare feet slapped cement and mottled with dirt.

Gorgeous & Gritty – The Urban Photography of Guru Thapar

Kendra hardly slept at all that night. Falling in and out of consciousness, her insides twisted with nervous anticipation, and liquid dreams brought her in and out of imagined crevices within the dark surroundings—a place of distant birds calling to one another, of small animal feet crackling twigs underfoot, of Top Fire only knows what else. No one ever spoke of what existed in the Surrounding of the Home.